George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

A sketch of perhaps the most magnificent example remaining of north German domestic architecture—the Rathhaus at Münster—will show you how, even with the most beautiful detail and the best possible sculpture, this faulty mode of designing was always persisted in; from Münster in the fourteenth century one may trace it going into the brick districts to the north and—as at Lüneburg—filling entire towns with its extravagancies, and then settling down, as we find it at Lübeck, into a regular system of stepped gables and panelled façades, beyond which the dream of house-builders never went. I confess to having been sorely disappointed in the street architecture of Lübeck. In the first place everything except the churches, hospitals, Rathhaus, and gateways, is painted white, or whitewashed in the most ruthless manner, and the architectural merit of the houses before they were whitewashed must have been very small. The houses at the side of the Heiligen-Geist-Spital are the best specimens of the kind of elevation most in favour, and will, I think, quite justify my strictures, though they are less objectionable than most, in that the gables follow the roof line instead of being sham.

I have left until the last the town gateways, which are certainly two of the most effective I have ever seen. The Holsteiner-Thor has two spire-like roofs at its extremities, which are very effective, and its front towards the town is really a magnificent specimen of the good effect of a great quantity of arcading. The outer front of the gate is much less ornamental. In the string-courses there is a great deal of inlaid terra-cotta ornament. The date of this gateway is about A.D. 1477. The Burg-Thor and the buildings on the town side form about as picturesque a group as can well be imagined. It has all been lately restored, and, I fear, painted: the colour of the red and black bricks savouring to my eye uncommonly of artificial colour; but one can scarce imagine anything more strikingly picturesque than the whole group. The other side of the gate is almost exactly the same; but standing by itself, without the picturesque buildings on either side, is not nearly so effective.

All that I had heard of Lübeck made me promise myself a great treat in the study of the old brick buildings and the old treatment of brick. I must confess, however, that this was not so good or so satisfactory as I had expected, and that it is certainly very inferior to the Italian brick work. It is generally coarsely done, and there is but little attempted in the way of tracery, and that little is never very effective. I saw nothing, for instance, at all comparable to such brick work as one sees at Verona, Mantua, and Cremona; and I doubt much whether Germany produces any which can be compared to it. Except in one instance, and then only to a very slight extent, there is no attempt at all at mixing stone with brick, save at the quoins of the towers, where there are always immense blocks of stone, intended for strength, but contributing, I suspect, to the weakness which is quite a characteristic of all the churches in Lübeck, Hamburg, Lüneburg, and generally throughout this brick district. The brick churches of Italy are remarkable in that they owe much of their beautiful effect either to the mixture of stone with brick, or to the exquisite moulding of the brick, and the care and delicacy with which it was built; and one observes that whilst in Italy all the buildings have an air of refinement, in northern Germany they have an air of great coarseness, to which, perhaps, the entire absence of what can fairly be called window tracery in a great degree conduces.

Something may, however, be learnt even from the failure of other men, and so some points may well be attended to in this German brick work. And first it teaches us, distinctly and unmistakably, that brick is no material for window traceries; the necessity of using it ends either in the repetition of very simple and ugly windows, such as are almost universal in Lübeck; or, as in the Stadt-Haus, and again in the very remarkable church of S. Katharine, at Brandenburg, in the eternal repetition of the same small piece of moulded tracery, which, of necessity not very good in itself, becomes, by much repetition, quite hateful. And the effect is painful in the extreme upon the whole practice of art: in all cases, without any exception, I believe, where men have condescended to attempt to execute traceries or carvings in brick moulded in this way, the tendency has been, naturally enough, to repeat for ever things which by repetition become cheap. One moulded piece of brick tracery would be dearer than one like it in stone; but multiply it a hundred or a thousand times, and it becomes infinitely cheaper, but who can say by how much more infinitely tedious and unartistic! So at Brandenburg, crockets, crocketed gablets, component parts of tracery, and the like, are repeated over and over again, in a manner which is really marvellous; and because it was necessary to do this, immense sham fronts, sham parapets, and the like, must be raised, in order to display all the resources which were at their command. Now this is very poor architecture, very vile art; and it requires no argument to prove that it is only the natural and certain result of the attempt to use materials out of their proper place, and in a way in which it was never intended they should be used. Far worse would be an attempt to mould clay, so that it should counterfeit the work of nature; and so, in addition to the destruction of all art by its endless repetitions, insult God’s handiwork by counterfeiting stone quarried from the bowels of the earth.

The Lübeck churches show us, however, in other respects, what great things may really be done, and done well and naturally, in brick. You may form mouldings to any extent, because each moulded brick tells its own tale, does its own work; and mouldings, so far from not bearing repetition, gain by it. All the windows in a noble church require varied traceries, but it were as well that no two of them should vary in their mouldings. Here, therefore, the reproductive power of the moulder is most valuable; so, too, is it in all forms of ornament (as, e.g., the billet, chevron, and the like) which become ornamental only by repetition, and not in any way by reason of art or skill in the man who works them. These are absolutely better in brick than in stone, because, as no thought and no taste are necessary in the man who carves them, it were better the human intellect should be as little as possible deadened by working upon them. The windows of S. Katharine, Lübeck, show how these moulded bricks may be used in conjunction with stone traceries, and with admirable effect, when compared with the attempts at tracery in brick which this and other churches here exhibit.

But one of the most important facts which we can learn here is, that brick is not only good outside, but just as much inside a church. All the Lübeck churches are built, inside and out, with red brick; most unfortunately, this has all been whitewashed, but I think we may have faith enough in the men who built them to be sure that they would not have been built with brick had not the effect been good. For myself, I am persuaded that they were right in so doing; because I have seen in Italy the wonderfully solemn effect produced in this way, and have since tested it myself. In truth, no red brick building should ever be plastered inside, save where it is intended to introduce paintings of some kind more brilliant than the colour of the bricks.

On the whole, therefore, though the brick work of Lübeck is far inferior, in delicacy and beauty, to that which I have seen in Italy, there is much to be learnt from it, and much proof to be obtained, if proof be needed, that brick is really a most noble and serviceable material, and one which, wherever it is the material of the district, ought invariably and unhesitatingly to be used.

But I feel that, in criticising its brick work, I have been led into abusing old Lübeck almost too much. Perhaps I ought only to express my grateful recollection of all the treasures which she still possesses,—of her screens, her church furniture, her spacious interiors, and her many picturesque features of antiquarian and ecclesiological interest, her triptychs, her brasses, and her gateways,—rather than attempt to draw a parallel between her and Italy; between the stern ruggedness of the north, and the sunny softness and delicacy of the south; between, moreover, a city built as it were in a day,—for Lübeck’s rise was sudden almost beyond all precedent, without a history, and without older days to teach and to correct her,—and a land whose memories of the past and associations with old art were, even in the Middle Ages, well nigh as great, and as valuable in their influence on the mind of her people, as they can be even at the present day. More just it is, perhaps, only to be thankful for all the pleasures with which my three days’ sojourn in this noble old city was full even to overflowing; and (forgetful of the faults of her architects) to dwell more upon the lessons which their works cannot fail to teach us, if we will only lovingly and patiently study and examine them.

II
NAUMBURG CATHEDRAL

I reached Naumburg late at night in a tremendous storm; but the sun rose cheeringly, and I started early for the cathedral fearful of disappointment, as I had spent half the previous day in a mistaken attempt to find something interesting at Merseburg,—a place against which it is only right to warn all ecclesiologists. At Naumburg my fate was happier. The first view of the exterior is not very striking. A fair apsidal choir with a tower rising on either side, Romanesque at the base, and finished in late third-pointed, does not rise above the picturesque, and gives but small promise of the excessive interest of the interior. The plan is curious. A late Romanesque, or very early-pointed nave finished with eastern and western apsidal choirs, and separated from both of them by rood-screens; that to the eastern choir Romanesque, that to the western of most exquisite early pointed, and both of them coeval with the portions of the main fabric to which they belong. The eastern choir extends across the transepts, and is raised considerably above them, with solid stone parcloses, arcaded on the faces towards the transepts with semicircular arches, a kind of parclose not uncommon in the churches in this part of Germany.